NOWIN RACIAL JUSTICE

It’s Nelson Mandela’s 95th birthday. While the ailing anti-Apartheid hero remains hospitalized in South Africa, the subject of his legacy — and how exactly to portray it on film — has been up for discussion. Tambay A. Obenson points out over at Shadow and Act that Mandela’s story is most often told alongside that of a white character, which puts Mandela’s own life in the background:

Last week, 30,000 inmates in California’s state prisons began a hunger strike to call for an end to the use of indefinite solitary confinement. Here’s a written and visual piece from Michael D. Russell, an inmate in Pelican Bay State Prison’s Special Housing Unit (SHU):

There is a stark contrast between the majestic mountain scenery that surrounds Pelican Bay State Prison, and the utter desperation of life that exists behind its walls. Most of the men here wear the look of those crushed under years of carrying a heavy burden. Their faces tell a story all their own — one of unrealized potential, punishing consequences, and possibilities of future success that no longer exist.

Pelican Bay State Prison is a maximum-security prison, where many men spend years in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) — 23 ½ hours a day, locked in a windowless cell. I’ve spent a quarter of my life in this prison’s cages, in its mud, learning to deal with the loud rhythm, the madness and isolation, the absence from my family and friends that has turned me into a total stranger, with so much empty uncertainty. I don’t sit here and cry. Nobody does.

The full character of a man shows itself in the SHU, where there is nowhere to hide. And today, I stand proudly back-to-back with all those strong respectful men, whose choice it is to now venture into a hunger strike and work stoppage, in peaceful protest.

In a 3-to-2 decision, South Carolina’s Supreme Court has ruled that the Native child whose case went to the US Supreme Court will be placed back with the white family that sought to adopt her.

In its ruling, the US Supreme Court held that Dusten Brown, and his daughter, Baby Veronica—who are both citizens of the Cherokee Nation—were essentially not protected under the Indian Child Welfare Act. As such, the case was bounced back to the South Carolina court. After the ruling, Brown ironically attempted to adopt his own daughter in Oklahoma, since the high court didn’t recognize his rights as a parent. But Oklahoma declined to hear the petition, claiming that South Carolina retained exclusive jurisdiction of the case, since that was where the potential adoptive parents resided.

The South Carolina court agreed Wednesday to terminate Brown’s parental rights, ruling against him and Cherokee Nation. The ruling means that Matt and Melanie Capobianco, the white couple that sought to adopt Veronica, will now regain custody and finalize the adoption.

In their dissenting opinion, two of the justices drew attention to the fact that although Veronica was temporarily placed in pre-adoptive care with the Copabiancos, she was placed with her birth father while still a baby. Just a couple of months shy of age four, she’s now being taken from her father in what the justices are calling “an abrupt transfer,” that is not necessarily in Veronica’s best interest.

Brown does have five days to petition for a rehearing, though it remains unclear what legal avenues he may have left to pursue.

The official full trial for a state constitutional challenge against a photo voter ID law passed in Pennsylvania began this week, and already two startling issues have emerged: One, there are still hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians who don’t have the necessary identification to vote over a year since civil rights groups challenged the law saying it would disenfranchise many voters; and two, the chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party said that the voter ID law was instrumental in cutting votes for Obama by about five percent.

As reported by Think Progress, Pa. Republican Chairman Rob Gleason was asked in a state cable network news show was asked if the legal controversy around the voter ID law affected last year’s elections.” Gleason said it did, basically bragging, “we cut Obama by five percent” and that he thought “voter ID helped a bit in that.”

This comment is consistent with Gleason’s Pa. GOP colleagues state Rep. Mike Turzai who said the law would help Mitt Romney win Pennsylvania and Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, the bill’s sponsor, who said those who couldn’t comply with the law were “the lazy who refuse to exercise the necessary work ethic.”

It will be interesting to see how Gleason’s comments play out in the current trial over whether the law comports with the state’s constitution. Last year, the civil rights groups challenging the law successfully won a preliminary injunction that stopped the voter ID mandate from going into effect for the November elections (though poll workers could still ask for ID, voters didn’t have to show it). The state lost in those hearings because they couldn’t prove, per the many judges’ instructions, that the law wouldn’t lead to even one person disenfranchised. Here, Gleason is admitting to five percent of voters disenfranchised.

Which was consistent with the testimony of former Temple University professor Bernard Siskin, who said in the current trial to determine if the law should be permanently banned that as many as 511,000 Pennsylvania voters lacked the right ID to vote. According to the report from Philly.com, Siskin’s research found that among 900,000 African-American registered voters, about 89,000, or 10 percent, lacked ID, along with 11 percent of Asian American voters, as opposed to five percent of white voters.

He also testified that almost two percent of the 5.7 million people who voted in November would have been disenfranchised if the law was in place then.

Meanwhile, the free ID cards the state is supposed to send out to those without ID have been distributed slowly and not widely. According to civil rights law organization Advancement Project, one of the lawyers challenging the law, the state has issued fewer than 17,000 of them since the law passed 16 months ago.

The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University and the Hip-Hop Archive announced the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship on Tuesday. The goal of the fellowship is to provide chosen scholars and artists with an opportunity to show that “education is real power.”

The mission of the Hip-Hop Archive, according to the announcement, is to seek projects from scholars and artists that build on the rich and complex hip-hop tradition; to respect that tradition through historically grounded and contextualized critical insights; and most important, to represent one’s creative and/or intellectually rigorous contribution to hip-hop and the discourse through personal and academic projects.

According to a statement published Tuesday by the Eighteenth Judicial Circuit, four jurors have issued a statement distancing themselves from their colleague in the jury box:

We, the undersigned jurors, understand there is a great deal of interest in this case. But we ask you to remember that we are not public officials and we did not invite this type of attention into our lives. We also wish to point out that the opinions of Juror B-37, expressed on the Anderson Cooper show were her own, and not in any way representative of the jurors listed below.

The full statement is signed by Jurors B51, B76, E6 and E40—which means that so far, we’ve heard from all of the white jurors who served on the case.

That leaves the one woman of color—Juror B29—who has remained silent since Saturday’s verdict. As we noted previously, Juror B29 appeared to have been wiping a tear from her eye during the state’s closing rebuttal. If she does emerge, we might better understand how the jury found Zimmerman not guilty on all charges in connection to the killing of Trayvon Martin.

Cameroonian LGBT activist Eric Ohene Lembembe, Executive Director of the Cameroonian Foundation for AIDS (CAMFAIDS) had recently warned supporters of “anti-gay thugs.” Now, it appears that he’s become one of their latest victims.

Lembembe was found tortured and killed in his home in the Cameroonian capitol of Yaoundé. For years, he had fought against the rising tide of LGBT violence that had recently washed over the West African country, violence so brutal that a report by Amnesty International found the country’s authorities guilty of “grave human rights violations — including forcing suspected gay men to undergo forced anal exams. In a detailed look at the report, blogger Rod McCullom called Cameroonian President Paul Biyah head of one of Africa’s most repressive anti-LGBT regimes.

Friends reportedly found Lembembe’s body on Monday and reported that both his neck and feet appeared to be broken and that he had been branded with an iron, according to a graphic report in the Huffington Post.

The U.S. Department released a statement condemning Lembembe’s murder. “We deplore the brutal murder of Eric Ohena Lembembe, who was found tortured to death in his home in Yaoundé yesterday,” the statement read. “We condemn this terrible act in the strongest terms and urge the Cameroonian authorities to thoroughluy and promptly investigate and prosecute those responsible for his death.”

Over at The Daily Beast, Neela Ghoshal recounted the important work that Lembembe did on behalf of the LGBT community and people living with HIV and AIDS.

When Lembembe spoke, th[e] snickers [of Cameroon’s military police] trailed off. “I am Cameroonian, like you,” he said. “Let’s be serious. We all know that gay people exist in Cameroon. In fact, they exist in all of our families. And we all know that they are mistreated. Would you tolerate this abuse if this were your brother? Would you laugh at it, if this were your sister?” Lembembe picked up the stories where I had left off, and the gendarmes listened. They didn’t commit to taking action, not at this initial meeting, where defenses where high, but they listened.

Lembembe’s brand of activism was beginning to shake things up in Cameroon. Along with a cadre of other young, outspoken LGBT-rights activists in Yaoundé and Douala, Lembembe was impatient for change. Statements by President Paul Biya at a news conference in France and by Biya’s foreign minister at the U.N. Human Rights Council, to the effect that Cameroon was “not yet ready” for full equality for its lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender citizens, got under Lembembe’s skin. He did not see why he should be treated like a second-class citizen for one day longer.

Lots of talk about California becoming a “majority minority” state and effectively charting a path that will soon be followed by the rest of the country. The thing is, in Los Angeles, it’s old news. Here’s a brief history of the Mexicans who founded the city of Los Angeles.

In the aftermath of George Zimmerman’s acquittal on all charges related to the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, the continued racial profiling of young black men has become even bigger news than usual. On Tuesday, Essence Magazine launched a social media campaign called #HeIsNotASuspect to challenge the negative images of young black men in the media. Its aim is to end racial profiling by targeting the often unacknowledged victims of violence targeted at young black men: the black mothers, grandmothers, aunties, sisters, and girlfriends who are often left behind to pick up the pieces.

So far, the campaign has unearthed beautiful images and declarations of love. Check them out after the jump.

Within hours of a Florida jury’s decision to acquit George Zimmerman of all charges related to the death of Trayvon Martin, the NAACP launched a peition calling on the Justice Department to prosecute the former neighborhood watchman on civil rights charges. The petition quickly picked up steam — even crashing the civil right’s organization’s website for severala hours — and has now recieved over one million signatures.

“I knew I was not alone in my outrage, anger, and heartbreak over this decision,” NAACP President Ben Jealous said in an official statement obtained by The Grio. “When a teenager’s life is taken, and there is no accountability for the man who killed him, nothing seems right in the world. But we cannot let these emotions rule us.”

“This is the power of one million voices,” he added. “One voice in angry protest can be ignored, but when one million people speak as one - and thousands more take to the street in peaceful protest, rallies and vigils - we can change the world.”

The Justice Department has confirmed that the Zimmerman case is under review.

You can read the peition, which is addressed to Attorney General Eric Holder, after the jump.

The Colorlines community has grown dramatically in the past couple of years—and it’s still growing bigger every month. But we’re not just interested in size around here; we’re interested in meaningful engagement. So I’m proud to introduce our newest Colorlines Editorial Fellow, Stacia L. Brown. For the next 12 months, Stacia will be devoted to you, developing new ways to foster productive dialogue with and among our readers. In sum, she’s here to increase the sense of community between our readers, the Colorlines reporters and the newsmakers we cover.

So how will Stacia engage with all of you? Well, we’re going to expiriment and find out. There’ll be Twitter chats around news events in which racial justice plays a crucial role. There’ll be Google+ Hangouts, with live discussion in social media. We’ll grow more active in moderating discussions in the comment sections of our articles. And more stuff we haven’t thought of yet. We also invite you to reach out to us via email at community@arc.org.

We’re in good hands with Stacia. She’s the founder of Beyond Baby Mamas, a social media community dedicated to single mothers of color. The group provides a safe space for moms to share stories and dialogue on issues large and small, from the political to the emotional. She’s also a founding blogger at PostBourgie and a regular contributor to The Atlantic’s The Sexes blog and to Huffington Post Live. Most importantly, she’s part of our commuinty already, and many of you have likely met her on Twitter already.

So speak up! We’re ready to listen.

And you’ll get your first chance later this week. On Thursday, we will delve into George Zimmerman’s acquittal with a live chat. Colorlines News Editor Aura Bogado will lead a Google Hangout panel of youth, organizers and faith leaders to explore the question, What is justice in this case—beyond sending an individual to jail? Join the conversation on Twitter with @colorlines and at #HoodiesUpNext, Thursday, July 18 at noon.

Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson wrote about the lessons he learned from the Zimmerman verdict, all of which basically boil down to one, unescapable truth. Here’s an adaptation from the drummer’s Facebook note posted after Zimmerman’s acquittal.

Radio personality Tom Joyner has reportedly offered Rachel Jeantel a full college scholarship, funded through his Tom Joyner Foundation. From Business Insider:

The website Joyner founded, BlackAmericaWeb.com, confirmed the news. Jeantel spoke to Joyner on his radio show Tuesday morning.

He said to her: “If you want to graduate from high school, and go to an HBCU, even if it’s not in Florida but especially Florida,like Florida Memorial, Edward Waters or FAMU, if you want to do that, I want to help you do that. I will help you get tutors to get you out of high school, tutors to help you pass the SAT and I will give you a full ride scholarship to any HBCU you’d like.”

An oldie but goodie, here’s a snippet of William Greaves’ 1989 film Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice. In it, writer Toni Morrison reads from the pioneering black journalist’s memoirs about life in the South during reconstruction and her crusade to bring attention to the lynching of black men. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi on July 16, 1862.

Zimmerman Juror B37’s plans to write a book may have been thwarted, thanks in large part to her diastrous interview on CNN Monday night, but that interview sheds some light on the mindset that prevailed in that Seminole County Courtroom over the weekend.

Inmates throughout California’s prisons have begun their second week of a hunger strike to protest what they call the inhumane conditions of indefinite solitary confinement. An estimated 30,000 prisoners went on strike last week, calling for an end to the practice of indefinite confinement in the state’s high-security “special housing units” (SHU’s).

My former colleague Jorge Rivas caught up with families and supporters of hunger-striking inmates at California State Prison, Corcoran for ABC-Univision. “Family members are the invisible victims of solitary confinement,” says 24-year-old Reyna, who adds that she hasn’t touched her incarcerated father since she was about six years old.

Stevie took to the stage in Quebec City recently and told the crowd that he’s finished with Florida.

“I decided today that until the Stand Your Ground law is abolished in Florida, I will never perform there again,” Wonder said Sunday while performing in Quebec City. “As a matter of fact, wherever I find that law exists, I will not perform in that state or in that part of the world.”

“The truth is that—for those of you who’ve lost in the battle for justice, wherever that fits in any part of the world—we can’t bring them back,” he said. “What we can do is we can let our voices be heard. And we can vote in our various countries throughout the world for change and equality for everybody. That’s what I know we can do.”

It’s worth revisiting the FBI’s renewed manhunt for Assata Shakur, if only because today is her birthday. Here’s rare interview footage from 1998 that was re-broadcast on Democracy Now last spring, shortly after the FBI announced that it had added Shakur to its list of most wanted terrorists.

It’s hard to watch Rachel Jeantel’s interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan. And it’s not because of the way she speaks. But because you’re watching a heartbroken young woman recount painful memories of a friend who was murdered. One of the most striking things about the segment is the tenderness with which Jeantel describes her friendship with Trayvon Martin; her face lights up and she smiles when she remembers talking to him on the phone all day. It’s a rare moment that humanizes Martin amid all of our national outcry.